What the hell is going on with XBox-Live?

OK, I’ve just joined XBox-Live to play online games on my XBox.

Seemingly, after 9pm GMT my games (COD4, in particular) become unplayable. Either I try to find a game and it tells me nobody is playing online, I join a lobby and everyone just sits there for ages, then the lobby closes, I get a message telling me that I’m unable to join the game, or I finally join, and the game either times out, loses the connection or severely lags enough to cause all sorts of weird bugs (I didn’t have a player model one time, renamed myself to the empty string, was in third person, and could only move sideways like a crab, but seemingly everybody else could see me).

So, seeing as everybody else seems to get this problem (hence us all sitting in lobbies for ages and judging by some voicechat), it’s obviously a problem with Live, correct? Is it always like this? Am I not going to be able to play any of my games after 9pm?

I have been experiencing the same things you mentioned. I have had my XBox Live account for a little over a year and have never seen it this bad. About a week ago it was a different issue, start the machine up and I was signed in on the dashboard. Start the game and it would sign me out of live, try to sign back in no dice, exit the game and go to the dashboard and I could sign in. Happened with COD4 and other games I tried.

This last weekend I saw two things the one you mentioned in the OP and another where when a game was launched I could push the xbox guide button and it would show that I had friends online, but on the dashboard it didin’t appear to be logged in, and the game lobby would not connect, it would get caught in a waiting to download game settings.

I think Microsoft must have sold of ton of consoles for the holiday and is having problems with getting them all conncected to live. It must be a traffic issue

The short answer: the massive influx of new Xbox Live accounts from Christmas and increased usage put too much of a strain on the servers. It should be better now: http://www.majornelson.com/archive/2007/12/29/xbox-live-status-12-29.aspx